Posts tagged film

"Matt and Trey with a lot of money. Be afraid."

The New York production [of The Book of Mormon] makes $1.6 million a week, according to the producers. A touring version of the show makes about $1.6 million a week, and another production in Chicago grosses $1.5 million a week. And the show is about to go into production in London.

And that’s on top of the lucrative and groundbreaking deal they have with Comedy Central.

So, what do you do when you’re as creative and as talented as Trey Parker and Matt Stone and have a big pile of money? You form a $300 million production studio and you do whatever you damn well please.

kateoplis:

“Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant and brutal revenge western is a wildly exciting return to form: a thrilling adventure in genre and style climaxing in a bizarre and nightmarish scenario in a slave plantation in 1858. The movie is managed with Tarantino’s superb provocation and audacity, with a whiplash of cruelty and swagger of scorn. It is superbly acted by Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio and, particularly, Samuel L Jackson, who creates a masterpiece with his chilling character Stephen, the grey, stooping servant-elder to DiCaprio’s unspeakable slave-owner Calvin Candie. […]
Django Unchained also has the pure, almost meaningless excitement which I found sorely lacking in Tarantino’s previous film, Inglourious Basterds, with its misfiring spaghetti-Nazi trope and boring plot. I can only say Django delivers, wholesale, that particular narcotic and delirious pleasure that Tarantino still knows how to confect in the cinema, something to do with the manipulation of surfaces. It’s as unwholesome, deplorable and delicious as a forbidden cigarette.”
★★★★★ | Guardian

kateoplis:

Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant and brutal revenge western is a wildly exciting return to form: a thrilling adventure in genre and style climaxing in a bizarre and nightmarish scenario in a slave plantation in 1858. The movie is managed with Tarantino’s superb provocation and audacity, with a whiplash of cruelty and swagger of scorn. It is superbly acted by Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio and, particularly, Samuel L Jackson, who creates a masterpiece with his chilling character Stephen, the grey, stooping servant-elder to DiCaprio’s unspeakable slave-owner Calvin Candie. […]

Django Unchained also has the pure, almost meaningless excitement which I found sorely lacking in Tarantino’s previous film, Inglourious Basterds, with its misfiring spaghetti-Nazi trope and boring plot. I can only say Django delivers, wholesale, that particular narcotic and delirious pleasure that Tarantino still knows how to confect in the cinema, something to do with the manipulation of surfaces. It’s as unwholesome, deplorable and delicious as a forbidden cigarette.”

★★★★★ | Guardian

This was the first project I ever supported via Kickstarter. As a lifelong P-Orridge devotee, I was delighted to send Marie Losier some money. Sadly, I was unable to view the film when it hit NYC. I’m so excited to finally see it! 
While I haven’t seen the film, I’m quite familiar with these two and I love the quote on the cover:

“A quietly revolutionary work that treats a pair of people on the fringes with the decency all humans deserve.” 

Buy @ Amazon

This was the first project I ever supported via Kickstarter. As a lifelong P-Orridge devotee, I was delighted to send Marie Losier some money. Sadly, I was unable to view the film when it hit NYC. I’m so excited to finally see it! 

While I haven’t seen the film, I’m quite familiar with these two and I love the quote on the cover:

“A quietly revolutionary work that treats a pair of people on the fringes with the decency all humans deserve.” 

Buy @ Amazon

In France, when I started talking about the fact that at 13, people would hit on me—which I think is pedophilia—people were like, ‘Who do you think you are?’ It destroyed my career. It destroyed it. The press was against me, saying I was a bitch, basically, a horrible person to dare to accuse these directors of being bad for wanting to have sex with a 12-year-old. That was the time, you know. ’80s France.

Julie Delpy

Great article. Delpy is awesome. 

zachlinder:

My favorite Oscars moment:

10 years ago, only five months after September 11th, Woody Allen makes an unprecedented appearance at The Academy Awards (he had never appeared before, and has never since, and that likely won’t change this year with Midnight in Paris) to introduce a montage of films shot in New York City put together by Nora Ephron.

bliptv:

The Bechdel Test for Women and The 2011 Academy Awards
Do this year’s Oscar nominees contain even one scene where two women speak to each other about something other than a man? 
WATCH

I have to reblog this again. It’s too hard to resist after reading this LA Times article, which contains the following passage:

Oscar voters are nearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male, The Times found. Blacks are about 2% of the academy, and Latinos are less than 2%. Oscar voters have a median age of 62, the study showed. People younger than 50 constitute just 14% of the membership. 
The Times found that some of the academy’s 15 branches are almost exclusively white and male. Caucasians currently make up 90% or more of every academy branch except actors, whose roster is 88% white. The academy’s executive branch is 98% white, as is its writers branch.
Men compose more than 90% of five branches, including cinematography and visual effects. Of the academy’s 43-member board of governors, six are women; public relations executive Cheryl Boone Isaacs is the sole person of color.

As Anita Sarkeesian notes in her Bechdel Test episode, none of this means that the current crop of Oscar nominees are bad movies. But it probably does mean that equally good movies have been left out for no good reason. And it virtually guarantees that movies that don’t reinforce the white male experience will not receive nominations. 

bliptv:

The Bechdel Test for Women and The 2011 Academy Awards

Do this year’s Oscar nominees contain even one scene where two women speak to each other about something other than a man? 

WATCH

I have to reblog this again. It’s too hard to resist after reading this LA Times article, which contains the following passage:

Oscar voters are nearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male, The Times found. Blacks are about 2% of the academy, and Latinos are less than 2%. Oscar voters have a median age of 62, the study showed. People younger than 50 constitute just 14% of the membership. 

The Times found that some of the academy’s 15 branches are almost exclusively white and male. Caucasians currently make up 90% or more of every academy branch except actors, whose roster is 88% white. The academy’s executive branch is 98% white, as is its writers branch.

Men compose more than 90% of five branches, including cinematography and visual effects. Of the academy’s 43-member board of governors, six are women; public relations executive Cheryl Boone Isaacs is the sole person of color.

As Anita Sarkeesian notes in her Bechdel Test episode, none of this means that the current crop of Oscar nominees are bad movies. But it probably does mean that equally good movies have been left out for no good reason. And it virtually guarantees that movies that don’t reinforce the white male experience will not receive nominations. 

bliptv:

Whether you’re a feminist or a fangirl or you just like to learn, these six “Tropes vs Women” episodes of Feminist Frequency are absolutely fascinating. Host Anita Sarkeesian makes sure you’ll never look at entertainment the same way. 

Watch:

I recommend starting with The Straw Feminist. And I’m not totally on board with The Mystical Pregnancy. 

checkthegate:

FCP X: Didn’t We Ask For This? by Jeremy Garchow
CTG: I want to commend Jeremy Garchow for this excellent piece on FCP X. A lot of people are torching him for it in the comments section, yet most of them don’t use any specifics on why they believe the program isn’t what we (“editors”) asked for. Good work Jeremy, you make a lot of great points and the article really delves into the new functions of FCP X. It’s absolutely worth a read fellow Tumblr’s. I know FCP X has been polarizing, but it’s time to stop kicking and screaming and start trying to wrap our heads around the software.
(above article link via: creativecow.net)

Excellent. Can’t wait for Logic Pro X!

checkthegate:

FCP X: Didn’t We Ask For This? by Jeremy Garchow

CTG: I want to commend Jeremy Garchow for this excellent piece on FCP X. A lot of people are torching him for it in the comments section, yet most of them don’t use any specifics on why they believe the program isn’t what we (“editors”) asked for. Good work Jeremy, you make a lot of great points and the article really delves into the new functions of FCP X. It’s absolutely worth a read fellow Tumblr’s. I know FCP X has been polarizing, but it’s time to stop kicking and screaming and start trying to wrap our heads around the software.

(above article link via: creativecow.net)

Excellent. Can’t wait for Logic Pro X!

On George Lucas and Star Wars Revisionism

They’re his films. He can do what he wants with them. I’m actually intrigued by what he’s doing, even if I don’t actually want to watch the doctored work. The bummer is that he doesn’t make the originals available. The even bigger bummer is that technology moves quickly and devices capable of of playing the original video releases are quickly disappearing.

On the bright side, we’ll eventually see some beautiful homebrew digital versions of the original films. Perhaps they already exist. The kids are usually the ones fucking with things. This time they’ll be protecting the sanctity of the original.

An underground community has been doing something similar with Beatles records for over 25 years. They’ve preserved the original sound when digital presentations deliberately mucked it up. There are countless competing Beatles catalogs being traded via BitTorrent, Usenet and certain record stores around the world. Sometimes the community has to take matters into its own hands in order to preserve certain cultural touchstones. 

Of course, once a piece of art is ingrained in a culture for this long, its relationship with that culture ceases to be about the original work. It becomes a shared, and fluid, idea. Maybe Lucas is just actively participating in this fluidity instead of resigning himself to the sidelines as the mere creator of the work, as tradition dictates.  If so, what he’s doing today might be just as groundbreaking as what he did in the 70’s. 


“For me, stealing’s always been a lot like sex. Two people who want the same thing: they get in a room, they talk about it. They start to plan. It’s kind of like flirting. It’s kind of like… foreplay, ‘cause the more they talk about it, the wetter they get. The only difference is, I can fuck someone I’ve just met. But to steal? I need to know someone like I know myself.”

One of my favorite films.

“For me, stealing’s always been a lot like sex. Two people who want the same thing: they get in a room, they talk about it. They start to plan. It’s kind of like flirting. It’s kind of like… foreplay, ‘cause the more they talk about it, the wetter they get. The only difference is, I can fuck someone I’ve just met. But to steal? I need to know someone like I know myself.”

One of my favorite films.

This Nostalgia Critic episode kills me:  The OTHER Animated Titanic Movie”

The takedown is nearly as funny as the movie is ridiculous. The movie is really ridiculous.

G